nto something truly bestial.
Rousseau's terrors of the designs of his enemies returned with great
violence. He thought he was imprisoned, and he knew that he had no
means of escape. One day (July 2, 1778), suddenly and without a single
warning symptom, all drew to an end; the sensations which had been the
ruling part of his life were affected by pleasure and pain no more,
the dusky phantoms all vanished into space. The surgeons reported that
the cause of his death was apoplexy, but a suspicion has haunted the
world ever since, that he destroyed himself by a pistol-shot. We
cannot tell. There is no inherent improbability in the fact of his
having committed suicide. In the New Heloisa he had thrown the
conditions which justified self-destruction into a distinct formula.
Fifteen years before, he declared that his own case fell within the
conditions which he had prescribed, and that he was meditating
action.[406] Only seven years before, he had implied that a man had
the right to deliver himself of the burden of his own life, if its
miseries were intolerable and irremediable.[407] This, however, counts
for nothing in the absence of some kind of positive evidence, and of
that there is just enough to leave the manner of his end a little
doubtful.[408] Once more, we cannot tell.

By the serene moonrise of a summer night, his body was put under the
ground on an island in the midst of a small lake, where poplars throw
shadows over the still water, silently figuring the destiny of
mortals. Here it remained for sixteen years. Then amid the roar of
cannon, the crash of trumpet and drum, and the wild acclamations of a
populace gone mad in exultation, terror, fury, it was ordered that the
poor dust should be transported to the national temple of great men.

FOOTNOTES:

[385] Streckeisen, ii. 315-328.

[386] Streckeisen, ii. 337.

[387] June 19, 1767. _Corr._, v. 172.

[388] _Corr._, v. 267, 375.

[389] _Corr._, v. 330-381, 408, etc.

[390] Bourgoin, Aug. 1768, to March, 1769. Monquin, to July 1770.

[391] See above, vol. i. chap. iv.

[392] The life of Bernardin de St. Pierre (1737-1814) was nearly as
irregular as that of his friend and master. But his character was
essentially crafty and selfish, like that of many other
sentimentalists of the first order.

[393] _Oeuv._, xii. 69, 73.

[394] _Oeuv._, xii. 104, etc.; and also the _Preambule de l'Arcadie_,
_Oeuv._, vii. 64, 65.

[395] St. Pierre, xii. 81-83.

[396]